Re: beginner

 Well, here we teach children a foreign language in school from 11 - 16.
After that they can choose to study a language more, but they don't have
to. I myself did French, and I didn't think the teaching was very good
to be honest, but I guess I was lucky because my parents sent me to
french classes at the weekend from 7 - 10 or 11, so I already knew a lot
of it. My parents were a little disappointed though because I never
really liked French much, so once I finished school I went off and
learnt Spanish instead, and now whenever I try to speak French I get too
much interference from Spanish. *sigh* I really need to practice my
Spanish... I only have so much time and I've spent a lot of it recently
learning Basque, so my Spanish is slowly becoming rusty.
 We're not all so bad actually: I believe Tony Blair speaks French
fluently, since he used to work there. So at least one of our leaders
can speak a foreign language. ;)

> <>I think you English don't speak other languages
> because you just don't need to. I saw many times
> people coming to Brazil for business, not speaking a
> single word of portuguese (not even spanish!), and
> they anger when anybody speaks English. My boss found
> one of this kind of people, who started speaking
> english, as if we were obliged understand him, and my
> boss said: "Shut up, and come back when learn
> portuguese". But there are serious people, who really
> wants to make business, who comes here already
> speaking portuguese, or spanish, at least (we
> understand spanish very well). Here in Brazil we have
> english classes in our schools (recently, spanish
> too). Do you have something familiar in the schools of
> your country?